Painting, modeling, gaming and general wargame ramblings. I am a member of the Warhamsters gaming group and have been gaming and collecting models for 30 years.
I am a memeber of a number of different online forums and have decided to gather all my modeling and painting things together in one place.
I would also like to use this space to put any thoughts and ramblings related to my hobby.

Cat Hair In The Paint Pot

Cat Hair In The Paint Pot

Or

Get off the damn table ya buggers!!!

Saturday, 15 October 2011

Keeping afloat in a sea of models.

How many projects are too many?

Just some musings on the subject.

As a hobbyist for many years I find that I have always got multiple projects on the go at any one time. But how many is too many?

If I were a dedicated tournament gamer then I would say that any project other than the army that I am going to take to the next tournament would be too many as all my efforts should be focused on getting the army painted well and then practicing playing with it until I was confident that it worked well.

If I were a gamer/painter/modeller who never attended any form of competitive event either in person or online then I would think that you could never have enough on the go at any one time. As they say “variety is the spice of life” and switching between projects is a good way of keeping interest levels going. I must admit that painting a 40+ model unit can be boring without breaking it up with some other models on the way.

However, I am neither of these. I am somewhere in the middle ground. I love to paint different things but I also like to attend competitive events now and then. This is where the problems can be. If you’re like me then you will decide to take an army to an event and will only have part of it completed. This will now add a time limit to this project which can at times seem like an age away but from experience can rush at you like a speeding train and before you know it you are painting into the night to get the basic paint colours onto the models so that you do not get marked down for unpainted models. What about all the other stuff that you were working on? Do you stop all these projects? Nah, you can just keep doing a bit of this and that. This is where I get myself in a fix all the time.

As a casual gamer I do not take competitive play too seriously (my excuse for not being very good) and play for fun rather than trophies. But I think that it is time that I started to put my projects into some sort of priority order which can be flexible depending on what is on the horizon at the time. This way, I can switch focus so as not to spend too much time on one thing that it leaves me rushing other things that I need to be ready by fixed dates.